by Ella M. Lee
I just hoped it wouldn’t kill me.
I sighed, refocusing my eyes on my laptop screen. “The rest of the list looks good,” I said. “If this works for a couple of weeks, I think we could probably make it the new regular delivery.”
“Sounds good,” she said. “Do you have anything to add to the winter list?”
The “winter list” was the set of improvements and repairs we wanted to make to the property after winter was over. We had moved here quickly, and we’d had a lot going on with the magic over the summer, but now that we were settled enough, we could begin preparing this place for the future.
A future that might include more magicians and a host of facilities to support them.
Our property was made up of many buildings—the main temple, the main living quarters, the outbuildings we used for storage and guest rooms, the lab, the gym, the gates, and several more—and they all needed attention.
Practically the only finished one was Nicolas’s apartment, a small building that he had turned into his combined office and apartment. It was set away from the others, outside of the fifty-foot range of his mind-reading skills, so he could get a break from all of us.
“I think the list looks good,” I said. “See how much of it Sylvio wants to do, and how much we need to hire an outside contractor for.”
My eyes went to the new roof insulation we wanted to add to the soubou, what we called the clan’s extensive main living quarters, made up of three floors of bedrooms, offices, common areas, bathrooms, and server rooms.
Although Sylvio was quite the handyman and carpenter and worked on many of the building changes and repairs, I didn’t think he’d want to touch the roof issues.
Our family, as we called our clan, was full of hard workers who were always willing to pick up the slack when needed. Nicolas had chosen all of us well, back when he originally planned the creation of Lightning. It seemed like we were all addicted to hard work.
I certainly was, but mainly because it distracted me. Writing books, researching magic, repairing buildings, cooking, food shopping, working out, running for miles—all these things kept me busy enough to forget the sadness and anxiety and loss.
Sometimes I wondered how long I could keep it up, because each movement and step felt heavier by the day.
I loved our clan’s gym. It was a beautiful building, set in a cluster that included a magical laboratory and a studio we used for dance and yoga. The long rectangular gym had high ceilings, big windows that looked out over the distant mountains, and rows of sleek modern workout machines. Like all of the buildings at the temple, it smelled of old wood, comforting and sweet.
Nicolas was the only one there, halfway through his routine, currently at the lateral pulldown machine. Despite my somewhat numb feelings toward physical interaction of any kind lately, it was impossible not to appreciate Nicolas.
The result of a genetic lottery that had generously gifted him long limbs and broad shoulders and mountains of grace, Nicolas had chiseled good looks and the body of a supermodel: broad shoulders, flat stomach, narrow waist, lean muscles. His face, with its rugged jawline and narrow nose and high cheekbones, belonged on magazine covers. His Chinese heritage had granted him slightly burnished skin and hooded, deep-set eyes, with the irises themselves a tawny brown, almost honey gold in color.
As they were possibly the most expressive part of him, I had fallen in love with the light and brilliance behind those eyes from practically the moment I had seen them.
It was hard not to feel inadequate next to Nicolas. Formerly Smoke Clan’s best researcher, one of Water Clan’s most powerful commanders, and now a pinnacle member of Lightning Clan. A published author, a scientist, a PhD holder, brilliant and driven, someone who spoke seven languages and was known throughout the magical world.
Nicolas Demarais was called “the Auspex” by most magicians because his unique gifts allowed him to read minds and see the future. He wasn’t omniscient, not quite, but he was close enough to it that he inspired fear and awe in almost everyone.
To this day, I couldn’t figure out why he loved me.
I’d always considered myself average looking. Plenty of other women had my wavy brown hair and blue eyes. Fewer, I suppose, had the annoying smattering of freckles on my pale skin. But my looks were certainly the type to get lost in a crowd, whereas Nicolas would turn heads, each person wondering if he was a movie star whose name they had forgotten.
I never felt like my intelligence, patience, creativity, or kindness could stand next to his. Nicolas gave me—and the entire world—nothing less than one hundred percent of his far-reaching capabilities.
Guilt clenched my stomach as I considered the lackluster effort I’d been putting into our relationship lately. He deserved so much more, but I couldn’t give it to him.
It wasn’t about him. I wasn’t upset at him. I didn’t blame him for Dan’s death. He hadn’t done anything wrong. The problem was me. I had never been able to handle grief well, and I didn’t know how to do it now, either. And I definitely didn’t know how to bring someone else into it. Nicolas was my first relationship since my early days of studying magic in Flame, and there were some aspects of connecting with someone intimately that I was still learning.
Nicolas was grieving too, but I didn’t understand his feelings. I never had, really. In many ways, he was as closed about his emotions as I was, complex and deep. A year and a half hadn’t given us enough time to uncover all of each other’s secrets or all the nuances of each other’s feelings.
Neither of us seemed to know what to do with the other, but we weren’t willing to give up yet, either.
And so we waited in this absurd holding pattern, each concerned for the other but not knowing what steps to take. Each asking questions, but nothing that could cut too deep.
I slept in his arms, kissed him, admired his brilliant work with our magic, and told him I loved him, but I didn’t feel close to him.
And I had no idea how he felt about me these days.
Hey, you, I thought, giving him a little wave as I made my way to a treadmill.
He gave me a smile, the same smile he’d offered from practically the moment we had met, but no one was a better actor than Nicolas.
Who knew what his smiles really meant?
“Can you send those numbers to me?” I asked Teng. “And your recommendation? You can CC Nicolas, too.”
I sat in Teng’s office, relaxed into a leather office chair with my legs tucked under me, cradling a mug of roasted green tea, watching our banks of servers blink lazily on the other side of a special glass panel. Teng sat nearby at his desk in front of a line of monitors, all displaying dizzying arrays of black boxes, small text, and indecipherable code. Slim and sallow-skinned with chin-length dark hair, Teng’s unassuming size hid vast power. Daniel had once called him the most powerful elemental magician in Water, and that had largely carried over to Lightning, although you wouldn’t know it from his huddled form, half hidden in an oversized gray sweatshirt.
His black-gloved fingers flew over the keyboard, his headphones hanging around his neck as he fulfilled my requests.
As his commander, he did everything I asked without question—even though he’d been in clans for at least two decades longer than I had.
This was a group meeting of sorts, with me, Teng, and Cameron present.
Cameron, who was generally quiet and shy, sat on the floor by the windows, his long legs stretched out in front of him. “Are you thinking four? Or six?” he asked Teng.
We were talking about expanding our clan’s servers and data infrastructure. Cameron, a former IT security specialist for the British Secret Intelligence Service, was a natural fit for my group. Between his knowledge, Teng’s hacking skills, and my data analysis skills, all of our clan’s information passed through my group.
“Four new servers, two new storage arrays, and we need to beef up the Wi-Fi,” Teng said, his eyes still on his screens. “Nicolas might ask for just
ification on that last one.”
Cameron rolled his eyes, shaking out his red hair. “Aye, right,” he said.
This was a bit of the Scottish sarcasm I’d had to learn since Cameron used it all the time. Teng didn’t pull the trigger on any purchases without Nicolas’s approval, but I wasn’t sure Nicolas had ever said no to anything. He bankrolled the entire clan and did so gladly, allowing anyone whatever would make their lives easier.
If a problem could be solved with money, it wasn’t a problem to Nicolas at all. That Teng always seemed so unsure about money indicated something about his past, something about how he was used to dealing with money.
It was a bad idea to pry into Teng’s history, so all I had available to me was what I could surmise. I looked to Cameron for more information, but he seemed content to tease Teng with sarcasm and then shut up.
I spread my hands. “I think Nicolas will be—”
A tremor ran through me, a cold tingling radiating from my chest down to the tips of my fingers and toes. I jumped up, startled.
Cameron did the same.
Teng spun his chair, his eyes fixed on something outside the windows. Our gazes followed his.
The shield around our property, purplish and translucent, was supposed to be an unbroken wall of defense circling our borders.
But in the distance, a section of it had fizzled out, a clean square open to the rest of the world.
Simply gone.
Before my eyes, pieces of the shield shattered one by one, like lights winking out, each sending shivers through me.
I watched, frozen, because I couldn’t parse the issue. The shield wasn’t being attacked—that would feel different to me. The shield would react differently. It was more like the magic had simply died. Like its power source was gone—but that wasn’t how shields worked. A static shield set up by a competent magician would last nearly forever. Magic had excellent conservation of energy. Unless the shield was actively drained, it wouldn’t just collapse.
Some of the best magicians in the world had set up our shield—Nicolas, Teng, Ryan, Sylvio.
Me.
Teng, Cameron, and I watched out the window for a full minute, until the last of what we could see of the shield had disappeared. Given the continued tingling in me, I imagined the whole thing was crumbling as we stood here.
I turned back to face Teng, examining his wide-eyed, aghast expression. “What the hell?”
He looked to Cameron and then back to me. “I don’t know.”
Well, that wasn’t good.
“Come on,” I said.
We were the last to arrive outside. Nicolas, Sylvio, Athena, and Chandra had already taken off at a run to the perimeter. Ryan removed his blue-lensed glasses, which were enchanted to see the complex flows of magic more clearly, and swallowed hard, spinning in a circle to examine the damage.
Our shield was gone, the static of its dissipated magic heavy in the air.
Irina and Keisha stood near Ryan, similar expressions of dismay darkening their faces.
“This can’t be good,” said Farhad from over my left shoulder, running a hand through his curly black hair.
I looked up at him. “No, I don’t think so.”
We all waited until the others were back. Their slow walk confirmed what I already knew: There had been no attack.
“I don’t know what happened,” Nicolas said once we had all gathered around. “Our magic sometimes misbehaves, but this…” He shook his head, his expression solemn. “This is new.”
We could all tell by his troubled tone that, although our magic’s idiosyncrasies and deviances were often interesting and useful, this was the bad kind of new.
Chapter 2
The sun had only just fully risen over the mountains, but I’d been up and working since before first light. Nicolas, Ryan, and Teng had stayed up late into the night rebuilding the shield from scratch. I’d offered to help, but Nicolas said he wanted my fresh eyes on it in the morning after most of the work was completed.
He had come to bed shortly before I got up to start my day, and now I was walking the perimeter of the property, my eyes trained on our persnickety magic.
Although we were fairly confident that our location was a secret from the other clans, we took precautions. Our magical shield was vital to us, and out of an instinctive wariness, we wasted no time rebuilding it to perfection just in case. I studied the lavender magic, letting my eyes follow the black and white sparks that moved within it.
It wasn’t a physical shield meant to keep out humans or animals. Rather, it was imbued with layers of wards, most meant to warn us of breaches, but some meant to react to magical attacks or dampen the magic of other clans.
My specialty in Lightning seemed to be designing wards. Most of the ones we had were mine, although Nicolas, Teng, Cameron, and Ryan often helped me refine their structure. As I studied the designs inlaid into the shield, my heart eased. Every bit of our magic felt like home to me, and I couldn’t find a single line or thread out of place in the rebuilt barrier.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Now if only we could figure out what had destabilized it enough for it to break to pieces before our eyes.
I let my mind focus on our sanctum, but nothing felt amiss.
Hopefully the others would wake up with some ideas. Some of the best magical minds in the world were collected in my clan, and I trusted them beyond belief.
My eyes wandered to the temple as I walked, and then roamed over the scattered outbuildings and gardens and trees that surrounded the soubou, the largest building we had, where we all mostly lived and worked. It was so strange to think that my home was now a six-hundred-year-old Japanese temple complex with tatami mat floors, koi ponds, hand-painted shoji screen doors, creaky wooden walkways, and an imposing air of ancient wisdom. Nestled in a picturesque field between mountains, fields, and farms, our home was paradise.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I checked it quickly, finding a message from Nicolas sent to our entire clan.
Meeting in 10.
I frowned. That meant he had hardly gotten any sleep at all. I sighed, brushing dirt and bits of leaves from my knees and shins, rubbing my hands together to warm them up, and trudged back across the property toward home.
When I stepped through the kitchen door to grab some tea before the meeting, I found Nicolas there on the phone. He was dressed formally for the day in a gray button-up shirt and black tie, although his hair looked like he had run his fingers through it about a hundred times, and his eyes were a bit shadowy. He was gazing out the kitchen windows into our inner courtyard.
“All right. Thank you, Mark,” Nicolas said into the phone, and I frowned.
We only knew one Mark—Mark Ember, my brother, a commander in Meteor Clan. He was also a close ally of Nicolas, practically forced into it after Nicolas saved his life at the beginning of the year. The two of them were plotting to make Mark a pinnacle member of Meteor. I knew they spoke somewhat frequently, but Nicolas didn’t mention Mark to me except to update me on the basics of his life.
I was still angry that Mark had accidentally gotten our father killed, faked his own death, joined Meteor, hid from me for eight years, and resurfaced only to attempt to assassinate Nicolas. Nicolas, who handled stress and enemies better than anyone I’d ever met, didn’t have qualms about working with Mark, but his magnanimity hadn’t worn off on me.
“I will let you know,” Nicolas said. “Ciao.”
I took a bottle of green tea out of the fridge. “So… Mark’s alive, huh?”
Nicolas turned and smiled. “Yes. He’s been making some waves in Meteor. He seems to like the attention.”
“Like someone else I know,” I said, poking Nicolas’s shoulder. “How’s Evie? Their wedding pictures were pretty.”
Mark had married his fiancée, Evie, in October. Their beach wedding on the Baja California Peninsula had included a lot of fresh flowers, azure waters, and smiling guests. I had been invited, but I didn’t atten
d. It would have made things awkward, what with all the Meteor magicians present, and I had no idea how I’d feel seeing Mark again. Nicolas and I had sent them gifts and an extravagant amount of money instead, mostly to assuage my guilt.
“Evie is fine,” Nicolas said, placing a hand on my lower back and guiding me toward the meeting room. “Those two are both very strong.” Nicolas leaned in to kiss my temple. “Much like you and me.”
I managed a weak laugh as I took a seat next to him on our common room couch. I had never felt strong, especially not when held up next to Nicolas, whose power and reputation in the magical world had practically no equal.
We waited for a few minutes while everyone filtered in, settling down in usual patterns: Ryan alone in a chair near Irina, Cameron and Teng together, Athena and Chandra chatting quietly, Sylvio offering Farhad a look at something on his laptop, Keisha running in at the last moment with a box of curry buns from the bakery in town.
Nicolas steepled his fingers and smiled at everyone, surprising me with what seemed like a good mood.
“I do not have a lot of updates about last night’s incident yet,” he said, “but I do have a bit of good news. Claudius called a little while ago. He offered me some forewarning that Sky is going to call a conclave of pinnacle members from all clans. The primary purpose of the conclave will be to discuss Lightning, although I’m sure other business will be attended to as well.”
“When was the last all-clan conclave?” I asked, startled. It wasn’t common that all the pinnacle members of the clans met at the same time.
“In 1991,” Teng said, glancing up from his tablet. “For the trial of Eduardo Diaz.”
Practically everyone in the room winced. Eduardo Diaz was a Sky magician who had been cast out of the clan for treason. Meteor had taken him in, and he launched a terrorist-like revenge plot that ended up killing fifteen people across three clans and wounding several others. His punishment was so contested that it had taken the pinnacle members from all clans coming together in order to sort out the issue.
